Minneapolis Aims at New Start for District

The Minneapolis school district
has been struggling in the past few
years with low student achievement,
declining enrollment, money
shortages, and frequent leadership
changes. Now, its leaders are staking
their hopes on a new strategic
plan to help revitalize the system
and rebuild public confidence.

At a meeting last week, the
school board adopted a set of nine recommendations
drawn from the
plan. They form a broad outline for
the district as it addresses complaints
that have prompted hundreds
of city families to sign their
children up for private, charter,
and nearby suburban schools.

The recommendations include
raising expectations and academic
rigor for students, correcting practices
that perpetuate racial and socioeconomic
achievement gaps,
building a stronger corps of principals
and teachers, and shoring up
the district’s financial health.

Minneapolis’ strategic plan still
must be shaped into concrete steps
to be implemented in the coming
months, a process made tougher
by next year’s projected $11 million
shortfall in the roughly $650
million budget.

But even in its conceptual form,
many welcomed the plan as a powerful
step toward unifying the city
around the most important educational
goals.

“This is historic,” Superintendent
Bill Green said in an interview.
“We’ve been very fractured.
But we’ve been able to reconnect
with all our stakeholders, and inspire
our community with hope
that this is a school district that
can not just survive, but succeed
and take us into the next century.”

Kate Towle, who serves on a
districtwide parent council that
advises the superintendent, supports
the plan, but notes that the
complexity of putting it into action
requires an unusual degree
of solidarity.

“We are going from piecemeal to
global,” she said. “The challenge is,
how do we do all the parts together?
We all need to work together
now.”

Defining Problems

McKinsey & Co., a global management-consulting firm, was
brought in last May. Through interviews,
surveys, and data analysis,
the company painted
a sobering picture of the
district’s troubles.

Three different name
tags have graced the superintendent’s
door in
the past four years. Enrollment
had fallen from
47,500 in 2000-01 to
35,200 last year, and
many community members
complained that the
district was doing too little
to improve its educational
offerings, even as
families abandoned the
Minneapolis schools.

State funding is widely
viewed as inadequate,
and local costs are rising, fueling a
deficit that is expected to approach
$100 million by 2011. Fewer than
half the district’s students meet
state standards in mathematics
and reading.

Parents, especially lower-income
African-American and immigrant
parents, felt unwelcome in schools
and were fed up with big classes
and with test scores that lagged
far behind those of white and
Asian children from more affluent
families. Teachers sought more
support handling scores of misbehaving
students. Principals
thought a more demanding classroom
environment was needed,
and wanted the right to assemble
their own staff members.

“[The district] will need to set a
clear direction and take bold action
to reverse the current direction,”
a September report by
McKinsey warned the school
board.

Some community members said
last week they thought the board’s
recommendations were sound, but
they stopped short of applauding
them because of a lack of detail.

“They are good ideas, but there
are no specifics laid out
about how they are
going to change things.
We’ll see what happens,”
said Ahndi Fridell, a parent
advisory council
member from southwest
Minneapolis.

Exactly how the district
will carry out the
recommendations remains
to be seen. The
Minneapolis Federation
of Teachers, which
is negotiating a new
contract, has made
no secret of its opposition
to the prospect
of allowing principals
to hire the teachers they wish regardless
of seniority.

“Why can’t principals be held accountable
with the teachers they
have, just as teachers are held accountable
for all students that
come before them?” said Robert
Panning-Miller, the president of
the 2,800-member affiliate of both
the National Education Association
and the American Federation
of Teachers.

“The message that is implicit is
that we’ve got a bunch of under-performing
teachers, which we
completely disagree with.”

Some activists are worried that
in the push to recommend higher
standards and close the gaps in
achievement, too little has been
said about how schools will help
students who are far behind.

“We support rigor, but it doesn’t
mean a damn thing when so
many kids need to be remediated,”
said Bill English, the co-chairman
of the Coalition of
Black Churches, who has been
active on school issues affecting
the predominantly African-American
north side of Minneapolis,
which has seen the most families
opt for charter, private, or suburban
schools.

“They need to put down in detail
how they are going to grab these
kids, put our arms around them,
so they end up being productive
and going to college,” he said.

Restoring the district’s financial
health could require help
from the state capital. School
board member Lydia Lee said
some of the budget woes stem
from a 2001 change in state
financing methods that shifted a
greater portion of school funding
from local property taxes to state
funds, and has left Minneapolis
with too little money.

How the district chooses to restructure
its lowest-performing 25
percent of schools could prove controversial.
The board is considering
“restarting” them with new
leadership, new staffing, and more
student support.

Its strategy could also include
opening quasi-independent, self-governed
schools that were made
possible by a new state law advocated
by community activists and
the teachers’ union.

Vol. 27, Issue 16, Page 12

Published in Print: December 19, 2007, as Minneapolis Aims at New Start for District